Both rails.
Both knees popping.
Nobody helped me.
Gene had asked them not to.
At the top, I turned around and looked down at nineteen faces, and I understood what he’d built.
Not a ramp.
A way into a house that I could manage by myself.
For twenty years, if I needed it.
“Well,” I said. “Somebody better say something, because I can’t.”
Gene came up the ramp behind me.
He didn’t kneel.
“Knees,” he said. “Mine are worse than yours.”
He just stood there with his hands in his pockets.
“Nancy Cole. I’m not a fancy man.”
“I wired hospitals for thirty years and I’m better with a conduit bender than with words.”
“I’m not asking to replace anybody.”
“Ray’s chair stays by the window. Margaret’s roses stay in the yard.”
“I’m just asking if you’d let me build you things for however long we’ve got.”
“And if, at some point, you’d like to be Nancy Mercer, I’d be the luckiest old man in Texas.”
